0.23

A new release of ReadiumJS (Chrome extension and Cloud Reader) and the Readium SDK have been released on June 10, as version 0.23.

The release notes are here.  The new CloudReader is here and you can get the Chrome Extension CRX here. Pending final smoke-testing of the CRX build, it will be pushed to the Chrome Store after some days.

On the Readium SDK front, the main evolution has to do with Android development. The old Android build system based on Eclipse has been deprecated by Google in favor of Android Studio.  At this time, the stable version is Android Studio 2.1.  Readium does support the “experimental” Gradle build system from the Canary channel, that enables debugging from Java across the JNI layer into C++? This feature is not enabled by default, but it’s pretty stable and worth using.

This new Readium SDK Android development toolkit is the direct result of the active participation of EDRLab in Readium developments.

Also important, a performance enhancement of up to 30% for some resource-heavy EPUBs. This is achieved by a better configuration of HTTP headers to properly cache resources for native apps. Please read the release notes to get more details.

The Cloud Reader now supports a subset of OPDS.  This feature has been present for a while but was undocumented and not quite complete.  This is now ready for global use.

The other evolutions have more to do with natural evolutions (e.g. the update of the MathJax library) or fixes.

The Readium community is now pursuing its work on the optimization of code and issue tracking. Please join the open-source dev team to get it done faster.

Interviews with Readium based application developers will soon begin, in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Readium and be able to prioritize the next evolutions of the best open-source EPUB library.